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31 January 2015

This is a stream of consciousness exercise. Please join in the fun, or not. If you join, don't feel like you must edit your post if you can help yourself, but visit other participants by taking their links and leave comments!

My word is chopped.

I picked this word out of the air, maybe because I was watching that Food Network show. Kids were competing, like 9 year-olds, using KNIVES! What the hell. Can someone say liability? I just saw a kid cut herself in the chopped kitchen. Am I over-reacting? Why do I choose a word which needs hyphenating and why do I choose words I don’t like to spell…like hyphenating. Sucks. And why did I even picked the word chopped anyway?

What can you do with this word except describe something that gets divided in two or more things, smaller things, smaller meaning lesser. Lesser meaning not more, so if I want more of something, now I have less because I chose to use the chopped and get lesser. Unless of course I keep all parts and glue them back together. My logic sucks, but as promised I have to post this shit, cuss words and all. This is embarrassing and I should never have decided to do this assignment.

Can I get something positive from this word chopped besides this chubby cute kid who just missed an opportunity to win 10 thousand dollars? Oh, yes! It’s the dessert round, now that’s freaking positive as hell. I’m getting another beer and watching this. Kids making dessert has to be better than my writing about the word chopped.

Join this linked assignment by adding your own stream of consciousness work. Pick a word,, any word. Then write your post and share it here. Deadline has not been set yet, but if you spam this blog, you might get chopped!!

24 January 2015

I know I’ve probably harped on this before and I’m sure there are novelists out there who have used these types of settings, but I’ll go a step further and explain to you why they work for me. Remember, I’m the reader here, so I should know, right?

Put an ordinary man in an extraordinary place.

Think about this for a moment. An ordinary man works in a third world country providing humanitarian aide to the natives. It is his passion and all the children love him, the men respect him, and the women shy away because he exudes virility and a superior masculinity. You, as the novelist, do not have to work that hard to show anything more about this character.

If you had an ordinary man in a setting where everyone else were ordinary, you would have to transform this character into an extraordinary one in order to stand out, or else what’s the point of this character anyway, right? Sounds like too much work to me and it doesn’t feel authentic.

Take me somewhere for the first time.

I’ve read plenty of novels with settings on beaches, cattle ranches, grand estates, and beautiful islands. I’m sorry, did I put you to sleep there? Why must romance involve beautiful sunsets, roses, and champagne? If you put me on a beach, the dominant sound of waves will ruin it for me, even if we’re supposed to be on the shores of some Caribbean island, unless you have other things going on too!

I want to listen to classical Malhum while walking through the streets of Morocco and biting into a sliver of B’stilla. Put the traditional settings out of your mind. Take me somewhere I can experience for the first time, and if you want to get more into the details you can even share the savory and sweet tastes of your pastry by describing it to me! MmMmm.

Pick an event, any event!

A carnival, a national football game, a political campaign, a wedding. Why do these work? Because it’s easy to hear, smell, see, and touch almost everything imaginable and the writer doesn’t have to work as much. Every beach has water and sand, but a carnival has rides, games, funnel cake, and people walking around with stuffed animals larger than their kids.

If you never had a wedding, here’s your big opportunity. You can make it as extravagant as you like and not have to pay a dime. Everyone loves a wedding. I know it’s been done over and over again, but not by you, right?

15 January 2015

My first discussion post for Strategic Communication class asked how we viewed communications in the past and to reflect upon the materials provided by our instructor. Which perspective did we find most helpful to our understanding of strategic communication? You all know me. I can't resist using personal experience in any challenge. This is about progress, so why not?

When Hatch (2013) mentions Malinowski’s photograph of the anthropologist observed by the natives (p. 39) it struck me as funny and reminded me of another photograph I had found years ago. In my photo, one guy is digging a hole. Joe, according to his name tag, is surrounded by several folks with similar name tags, only each of the observers has a title rather than a name, with “manager” on the end of their titles or “lead” at the front: Operations Manager, Lead Technician, Total Quality Manager, Facilities Manager, Heavy Equipment Manager, Lead Gopher, etc. all surrounding, watching, and pointing at Joe, the hole digger. Ironic? How many managers does it take to dig a hole? Zero. Just hire Joe.

This guy has no name.

I think I’ve been kicked around over the years with having a boss clearly focused on the modern organization theory and driven by the contingency theory in organizing teams, to having a new boss who might be a fan of the postmodern perspective. I’ll explain:

My old boss owned a software company and when he put me to work on a project team, I always found myself faced with clients having insatiable appetites for sabotaging my work. Though failures on my part, each project was a successful outcome for my boss, because he had predicted my failure. He would swim in terms such as risks and constraints, assumptions, deliverables, and return on investments, all things measurable.

In my blind desire to be successful, I didn't realize my boss had not placed these same criteria for success on other analysts, so I quit playing his game and played like the others, refusing to provide him with time-wasting flowcharts, timelines, and graphs. Soon enough, I was taking on projects, reaching out to clients, and making successes (completing goals and objectives I had set for myself).

The old boss has since retired, taking with him his mask of the grand narrative. I can relate with the postmodern perspective much more because of my painful experiences dictated by the tyrant.

There is no right way to do things and by the time you’ve grown accustomed to your comfort zone, someone comes along using new terminology for the same things you’ve been working on for years, but now you’ve become seated in your ways and management isn't happy. They want change. The newly employed use fancy words explaining the same symbols of the past and management is in awe.

The emerging discourse, through hidden meetings where veteran employees are excluded and new employees become heroes, plays out until someone at the top realizes there is a communication problem which if left alone could likely embarrass the organization as a whole.

It came at a meeting and was announced that our CEO made this perfectly clear. The word “dashboard” is not to be used in any context when introducing our new portal to members. He insisted there is a public profile and a personal profile. Why not the new flashy “dashboard” terminology the new guy used the other day? Because we are not implementing a DASHBOARD, it’s a personal profile page!

How much does communication or lack thereof play a part in your successes and/or failures?

05 January 2015

If I write one more article on “5 Marketing Trends to Watch in 2015,” I’m going to lapse into a coma. I’ve written so many, I’ve lost count. But the benefit of all of that work is that I’ve put a great deal of time into studying the best ways to market your small business.

As writers, we’re all small business owners in a sense. We’re working hard to “build our brand” and engage customers (readers). Many of us have read that one of the best ways to do this is through blog tours. Blog tours allow us to appear on other people’s sites, participating in Q & As, posting blurbs and doing guest blogs like this one. But you don’t have to do a blog tour to get the benefits of appearing on someone else’s blog. Here are three ways guest blogging can help you build a reader base.

Reason #1: You Gain New Followers

Bloggers have long expressed frustration that they work hard to write a thoughtful blog post, only to have no one show up to comment. When you appear on someone else’s blog, you get exposure to all of that blog’s readers and you send your own readership over to meet the blog host. I read a large group of blogs each day and I found most of them on other blogs. One great post could connect with your host’s audience and earn you readers for years.

Reason #2: It Increases Search Engine Visibility

Google wants to make sure when you search for something, you get the best results possible. Over the years, the company has worked hard to reward good content and penalize bad, spammy sites. A page is considered a better authority on a subject if there are links pointing to it. When you guest blog, the host posts a link to your blog and you post a link to it—both of those behaviors make Google’s algorithms happy. The more our blogs are connected, the better our chances that when someone types in search terms relevant to what we’re writing, that person will see our blogs on the first page of those results.

Reason #3: It Builds Community

The community in the blogosphere is amazing. The more we cross-post and promote each other, the tighter that community becomes. Many of us participate in events like the A to Z Challenge or the Insecure Writers Support Group, which means often we all have the same blogging friends in common. Guest posts give us the opportunity to introduce our own friends to the bloggers we’ve met, growing the community even further.

Instead of waiting until you have a book to promote, consider contacting fellow bloggers with an offer to guest blog. You can return the favor by hosting those bloggers on your own blog. Not only will it help your Google visibility, but it will also introduce you to new bloggers who are probably eager to find great new blogs to read.

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And thank you, Stephanie, for stopping by and sharing with us! I am in 100% agreement with all three reasons.

Stephanie Faris knew she wanted to be an author from a very young age. In fact, her mother often told her to stop reading so much and go outside and play with the other kids. After graduating from Middle Tennessee State University with a Bachelor of Science in broadcast journalism, she somehow found herself working in information technology. But she never stopped writing.

Stephanie is the author of 30 Days of No Gossip and 25 Roses, both with Aladdin M!x. When she isn’t crafting fiction, she writes for a variety of online websites on the topics of business, technology, and her favorite subject of all—fashion. She lives in Nashville with her husband, a sales executive.

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